In the court case about Donald Trump’s private papers, lawyers said that a past official from his administration told investigators that Trump, as president, was not allowed to make the documents he had public.
The papers are from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s response to a request from Trump’s lawyers. They have information from when the prosecutors talked to a person who used to work for the government. The official didn’t want to be recorded during the interview because it was too risky in the Trump administration, as per FBI notes.
The FBI notes, which are called a 302, have some parts blacked out so we can’t see the name of the person they used to work for. Their name is Person 16, and some pages are completely covered in black.
The former government worker who had access to see Trump and was in the Oval Office every day, told lawyers that there was no official rule to keep things secret, and they were never told about it while working at the White House.
In 2022, the FBI looked through Trump’s Mar-a-Lago house and found more than 100 hidden papers. Trump’s team said that when he was president, he made a rule that any papers brought from the Oval Office to his house were no longer secret.
Trump is being accused of breaking the law by keeping secret government papers when he was no longer at the White House. He was accused of committing 37 different crimes. The papers had hidden information about US nuclear weapons and protection. Trump did not want to return them to the government, so he tried to keep them. He said he didn’t do the things people said he did.
The new court papers don’t say anything different from what the special investigator has already stated, but they give us a look at some of the proof that Smith will present in the trial. This proof includes specific statements from people who are employed at the Trump White House.
In late October or early November of 2021, almost a year before police searched Mar-a-Lago, a former official asked Trump to give back government documents, according to the court documents.
“Return everything you have,” said the former official to Trump, according to the 302.
The ex-official said they tried to get many people close to Trump, even his kids, to tell him, “There are problems with the boxes. ” They are owned by the government. Ask your dad to return them. “It’s not worth the frustration. ”
In late November 2021, the former official said the warnings became more serious when talking to investigators. The person who used to work for the government said to Trump, who was wearing clothes for playing golf, “Give back everything you have. ” “Don’t give them a reason to charge you, because they will. ”
Trump gave a strange response like “you’re the man” to the investigators, according to the former official.
Another document submitted to the government explains an FBI interview about how the National Archives and Records Administration tried to find government records that were missing. This includes letters from President Obama and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The interview with a former Trump administration official, whose name is not mentioned but is called “Person 40,” talks about how Trump liked certain papers, like the North Korean letters.
The person in charge wrote down a lot of information about how records were managed when Trump was president. The notes say that another person who worked at the White House said that Trump didn’t believe in the system.
During a talk, Person 40 said that Trump’s boxes of papers should go to NARA. Person 14 asked, “Who’s NARA and how can they make it happen. ”
A person in their 40s wrote about how Trump destroyed, tore up, or threw away documents in the White House. Even when this was made public in a Politico story, the person said Trump didn’t stop.